Samuelson on the Google Book Settlement

Pamela Samuelson, the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and an advisor to the Samuelson High Technology Law & Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall has uploaded a brief article entited Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement to SSRN. The article will be published in July 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM. See also Samuelson's guest blog post on O'Reilly Radar (note the comments).

Samuelson argues the proposed settlement of the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. Quoting from the abstract, "It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the “dead souls” to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus."

You can also view Samuelson's slide show from her April 14, 2009 OCLC/Kilgour Lecture on the settlement. [JH]